Human-computer interactions have progressed to the point where humans can control computing devices, and provide input to those devices, by speaking Computing devices employ techniques to identify the words spoken by a human user based on the various qualities of a received audio input. Such techniques are called speech recognition or automatic speech recognition (ASR). Speech recognition combined with natural language processing techniques (together called speech processing) may allow a user to control a computing device to perform tasks based on the user's spoken commands. Speech recognition may also convert a user's speech into text data which may then be provided to various textual based programs and applications.
Speech recognition may be used by computers, hand-held devices, telephone computer systems, kiosks, and a wide variety of other devices to improve human-computer interactions.